Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

I said to her: "We're not in San Francisco anymore, Mary Ann. We're in Marin County!" We had come on a Golden Gate coach to San Rafael for the Bay Area premiere of Terry Zwigoff's GHOST WORLD. The film's premise we learned is that we inhabit a living parody of a nation.

American life is a comic book!

We are wastefully produced, broad stereotypes -- in primary colors -- who klump or fly, panel by panel, across an artificial-looking landscape, spouting trendy cliches, solving problems in simplistic, unsatisfactory ways. And then they (we?) are thrown into a landfill, become food for fish or are used to start a fire: Wow! Pow! Zap! Splat! Psss . . . .

Mary Ann and I, though we have lived in the Bay Area for years, had never been on a Golden Gate bus, had never even been to San Rafael. The contrast between foggy San Francisco summer and this sunny, small downtown (like a movie set) was striking. We walked the strange streets, a tall graying man, and a beautiful princess from far away. We imagined later that we might have been in Ghost World. (Mary Ann declared, however, that because of her royal status, she had always been excluded.)

In the World of Comics -- which may be traced to graffiti, as old as Humankind -- the emotional climate of a society is revealed, championed, parodied and made accessible. In America, the Katzenjammer Kids, Popeye and Mickey Mouse gave away to Superman, Dick Tracy, Li'l Abner, and at last, Wonder Woman, during the 1930's and 1940's. Then, a period of suppression and censorship in the 1950's harbinged a new darker period, dominated by twisted figures like Batman, Spiderman and Plastic Man.

In the wake of McCarthy, the Kennedy Assassination, the Sexual and Drug Revolutions, things really got kinky as Harvey Kurtzman's Mad Magazine and Help Comics spawned Terry Gilliam, Gilbert Shelton, Jay Lynch, Robert Crumb and Daniel Clowes. They took part in everything from Britain's mainstream Monty Python (early in TV and Movies) to Wonder Warthog, Bijou, Zap, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and Ghost World: underground comics from the 1960's to the present. In that 40 year period, this plebeian artistic movement bifurcated. One strand entwined with Walt Disney, Japan and Hollywood to create on comic book figures the immensely profitable animated and live action feature movies of recent years. The other, more radical strand has infiltrated our art, pornography, alternative teenage culture, and the political social fabric. Indeed, so disturbing became this influence that the U.S. Government was increasingly tempted to control its force, using censorship and -- some said -- extra-legal means (encouraging conspiracy theories).

[In 1978, Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler Magazine, bought the LA Free Press, an underground newspaper which published counterculture news, exposes and cartoons. He turned it over to Mark Lane, an early critic of the Warren Commission, and to comedian/social critic Dick Gregory. He gave them an unlimited budget and told them to find out who was really behind the Assassinations of JFK and RFK. I have a copy of the one edition they published, full of new investigatory reports, information and scathing cartoons. A few weeks later, Flynt was shot outside an Alabama courthouse. He has never recovered from his wounds, and his wife immediately closed down the LA Free Press.]

After finding the San Rafael Film Center, with a couple of hours to wait, Mary Ann and I asked a lean, bearded man in a Stetson, who might have been retired from the Westerns, where we might find a cocktail bar. He pointed: "There's a beer joint down down on that corner."

Indeed, there was, and that led to a marvelous dinner on the opposite corner at Cinecitta, a sister of Cafe delle Stelle in the City. We had found an island, safe from Ghost World, where we stayed until it was time for the movie.

As many American artists see it, we all inhabit a Ghost World, made up of the misunderstood or misinterpreted tribal/cultural attic, garage sale and museum objects of our historical past. And the soulless commercial architecture, advertising and junk of the American or (therefore) the World present.

That theme might stand for much of the most sensational original art, literature, and music produced in this country since World War II. Andy Warhol in Painting, Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon in the Novel and John Adams in Opera, to name a few, have been influenced in their work by the deconstructed, existentialist quality of our "underground" cartoons. Right at the moment, the drawings of other artists, such as Max Cannon, may be found on the Internet. Now Director Terry Zwigoff has extended his exploration of underground cartooning, (e.g., his masterful 1994 documentary, CRUMB), by collaborating with graphic novelist Daniel Clowes in a theatrical motion picture version of the latter's Ghost World.

Following in the ink trail of his mentor Robert Crumb (of "Keep on Truckin" and "Fritz the Cat" fame), Clowes ("David Boring" and "Eight Ball") is a 40 year-old son of a disrupted home. His millworker father and his auto mechanic mother separated before his second birthday, when she took up with a stock car racer. [Dad now constructs custom furniture and Mom, aged 70, is completing a law degree.] Fortunately, his Grandfather was an expert on Medieval culture at the University of Chicago, and it was he who whetted Clowes' artistic pen. But his memory of a graffito in a South Chicago alley gave young Clowes the title of his best known cartoon work: Ghost World.

Since graduating from The Pratt Institute in New York, Clowes has turned out an impressive stream of subversive images reflecting the steady acceleration of the destruction wrought in the traditions, values and meanings of American life; has skewered the corrupting make-over of our institutions to serve a ravenous, short-sighted, transient commercial society; has chronicled the marginalization and conglomerating of the American family.

It is the peculiar power of his cartoon medium that it can convey ideas of apocalyptic meaning using flat, innocent-appearing formats, which anyone may easily follow, without necessarily becoming aware of their poisonous messages.

Based loosely on Clowes' 80 page graphic novel, Zwigoff's adaptation of Ghost World required over five years to create. Many studios (until UA and Granada Television stepped up) claimed they loved the concept, if only the leading roles might be tailored to the talents of . . . Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinz. And would it be possible to add a happy ending?

Ghost World.

Unlike the blockbuster plot those stars might approve -- a mainstream live-action DICK TRACY (Beatty, 1990), perhaps, or the recent animated TOY STORY's (Lasseter, 1995, 1999) -- Zwigoff's GHOST WORLD offers no cheery solutions for American alienation.

The action starts, under the credits, with an incongruous sequence from a pretentious 1960's Bollywood (Indian) musical. We cut to Enid fruging wildly to a tape of the musical in her bedroom. From this juxtaposition (the last intimation we see objectified), we are to gather what is actually going on in her head.

Enid Coleslaw (Thora Birch) and Rebecca Doppelmeyer (Scarlett Johansson), known in the movie only as Enid and Becky, are two graduating seniors in a strange, stylized suburban school system. Enid is a voluptuous, passionate young woman, who hides her sexuality behind dark square-framed glasses and within loose fitting clothes and klunky boots. She is the brash leader of the two, but as we learn, she is almost pathetically dependent on her friend. Becky, more conventionally pretty, has a practical streak which she has suppressed in deference to Enid. They are also both highly intelligent, but they disguise that quality with wall-eye stares and cutting code remarks.

Their high school graduation scene is rather typical of the suburban middle-size model: Seniors standing and sitting in red nylon gowns, proud parents and fellow students admiring them, representatives of the faculty, administration and board of trustees officiating distantly. What a perfect picture of American spirit in -----

But what's this?

A young woman in gown and mortar board begins to address the gathering. She is in a wheelchair and appears wired together. She tells us how she was in a drunken car wreck in which several friends were killed, and she was maimed. She stresses what a learning experience this has been for her, what an inspiration it should be to her classmates.

Her plight is discounted by Enid and Becky, as is the gushy presence of their arty classmate Melora (Ashley Pendleton). Our heroines disparage both the destroyed life, and Melora's upwardly mobile ambitions, plus a number of the other "inspiring" moments, and later, at the senior party, we see a couple of young men pouring whiskey down the throat of the handicapped young woman.

The incongruous events are but the first in a series of dark intrusions which belie the smooth, conventional and entertaining appearances of reality we might find in, say, ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION (Mirkin, 1997). Notes of anti-semitism and racism against black people, etc, follow, each presented in an off-hand, unconventional way.

Enid and Becky, like many students not on the A-track, have only the vaguest idea what they will do after high school. (In this hermetic suburban world of Clowes/Zwigoff's imagination, unlike some counterparts in Appalachia or our inner cities, they are not going to get pregnant, become addicted to booze/crack, go to jail, or appear on the Jerry Springer Show.) The plan, if we can call it that, is to find some kind of work and move out of their homes to share an apartment of their own. Enid's part in the scheme is interrupted by her discovery that she will have to repeat an art class in summer school in order to procure her diploma. (Because she has genuine artistic talent and taste, she has of course failed her regular art class.)

Although we never see Becky's parents, we learn that Enid lives with her timid, tentative father (Bob Balaban), whom she resents, in surroundings as cluttered as any convenience store within the local mall. The two girls alternate their time, lying around Enid's room mooning, making plans for girlish revenge on their world, or trudging around the mall, where everything but themselves is franchised. Sometimes they bug an old man who is always sitting on a bench, seemingly waiting for a bus from a discontinued line.

They also torture their fellow graduate, Josh (Brad Renfro), who works in a chain convenience store. (They both, without admitting it to each other, are in love with Josh.) Enid, aided by Becky, engages in juvenile pranks, such as calling up a shy man from an ad in the personal columns, to observe who turns up at the assignation.

The man, Seymour (Steve Buscemi), is a middle manager for the Cook's Fried Chicken Corporation (a company which has what to a few viewers might be a surprising past), but his real love is collecting classic blues and jazz records. Although she stands him up at the original date in the Wowhouse Diner, Enid later runs across him at a garage sale, and is attracted by his passion for an original 78 blues record.

Together they hunt down the performer, an old black jazz guitarist, at a local club.

Without telling Seymour that she was the one who made the aborted date, Enid comes on to him in her own "cool" way. In his ordered collector's apartment, he is able to show her pieces of historical popular art, which she cab use in her summer course, taught by rag mop, red haired ex-hippie Roberta the Art Teacher (Ileana Douglas).

[Roberta is an interesting character. Nonjudgmental to a fault, but tamed by the system, she has the ability to evaluate professional work but is loath, perhaps unable, in the crowded short time she will have them, to give any real training to her students. (Anyone who, as a summer school instructor, has faced teenage girls, heads raised like deer or cobras, or sullen boys harboring visions of glory or suicidal/homicidal urges, all longing to be out in the sunlight, will appreciate Roberta's dilemma.) In the event, she makes a crucial (and rather astounding) error in judgment on which the plot turns.]

Meanwhile, Becky becomes jealous and frustrated. She is the more conventional character (at least in the movie), and after easily landing a job, hunts for an apartment on her own. In that act, as high school friends often do, she begins to move away from her friend Enid. At the same time, Enid's Dad renews his relationship with his old girlfriend Maxine, played by a very different looking Teri Garr. (I didn't recognize her.)

The ground falls away under Enid, and in many ways, that is the lot of all the characters. They are acquirers, you see. GHOST WORLD, on one level, is about the primary American experience of being dissatisfied. The things we have, aside from the fact that we possess them, are never as attractive as the new "thing," the next product.

The girl or boyfriend we have, the Society encourages us to think, lacks a "neat" quality which another person down the street seems to possess. We often find neither choice is satisfying. And we are always alone in our dissatisfaction, for we are drawn away from the warmth of humans toward the inanimate. The weight of American commercial society is thrown into the effort to make us dissatisfied with the objects we have collected, and inevitably, if incidently, with the human beings closest to us.

How else would America sell us all this disposable stuff? these fraudulent ideas, these temporary companions we call our salesmen, bankers, doctors, lawyers? And in recent decades, friends, fathers, mothers, children, lovers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers?

How else would the zombie-like concept of Ghost World, and similar alternative universes, hold such truth for our young, in this richest country in the History of the World?

After the movie was over, San Francisco Chronicle Critic Edward Guthmann carried on a Q &A with Bay Area Director Terry Zwigoff. A wiry, simply-dressed 53 years-old, Zwigoff never made a movie until in his late thirties, when much like Seymour, he became interested in tracking down a legendary blues artist, Howard Armstrong. The result was LOUIE BLUIE (1985). That film, ten years later, led to CRUMB, a landmark documentary in the field of connecting an artist's life to his art.

When Guthmann pointed out that GHOST WORLD had the highest per-theater-attendance at its premiere last week in New York and LA (two theaters, mind), the Director modestly remarked: "The movie may be big in New York and Los Angeles, but I wonder how it will do when it reaches Omaha?"

Good question. The first time theatrical director -- Zigoff had literally never directed a professional actor before -- and claims, ironically, John Huston as his model -- has surely not made a picture which will please everyone.

GHOST WORLD's most striking virtue, in terms of a conventional movie, is also its most damaging defect. Filmed in a flat style, like a comic book -- deliberate shot after deliberate shot -- seldom broken by a moving camera, the characters move jerkily within the frame, but the frame itself does not move overmuch. The colors of the major characters' clothes, makeup, and possessions, occasionally their hair, are presented in brilliant primary shades against drab backgrounds around LA. Photographer Alphonso Beato (ORFEU, 2000), production designer Edward T. McAvoy (NIGHT STALKER, 1985) and editor Carole Kraevetz (DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, 1995) are to be commended for reproducing the sensation of reading a comic strip while watching a movie, but many viewers may find GHOST WORLD, at 111 minutes, grows tedious.

Zwigoff admitted that he had a hard time directing, or pacing on the movieola, the humor of GHOST WORLD. The concept of the film worked against the fluid timing and cutting necessary for comedy.

Then, too, Zwigoff has simplified and stereotyped the characters even more than Clowes does in his graphic novel. Becky, for instance, is a more complex character in the cartoon, and Melora does not just babble in the strip about her acting classes but also about her work for Green Peace. Any topical references in the novel seem to have been excised.

My guess is that the great appeal of the film may be to the young. They realize so sharply the cold, sterile nature of our society, much more than older people, who have been acculturated. The young will appreciate GHOST WORLD's cynical, bitter humor, even when its comedic rhythm is out of kilter.

A bus figures in the end of GHOST WORLD, and as Mary Ann and I boarded the eerily-lit Golden Gate coach for the trip back to San Francisco, we joked that this might be . . . "The Ghost Bus!" Mary Ann allowed the movie was "okay," but that she never was part of Ghost World. I said, after a moment, that I didn't think I was either.

But we got lost in the fog on our way back.




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older